Instructional Practices

How to Keep Students Engaged in the Classroom

5 Min Read
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Keeping students engaged is an ever-present concern in today’s classrooms. Why? Because as a number of studies (and plenty of informal observations) have found, increased student engagement is linked to higher achievement and more effective classroom management.

But how can you be sure that your students are engaged? Here are some teaching strategies to keep students engaged in learning that you can employ.

5 teaching strategies to engage students in the classroom

1. Begin the lesson with an interesting fact

One way to jump-start the brain is to give it startling or interesting information. Look for facts that relate to the lesson to come, but don’t worry if they’re not a perfect match. The point is to wake students up and make them go, “wait, what?!” For example, did you know Venus is the hottest planet? Ask students what other facts about the solar system they might know when you start on this lesson.

2. Find meaningful connections

While having your own enthusiasm for a topic helps gain student interest, it isn’t enough to keep the students engaged in the long term. Instead, try to find ways to bring them into that enthusiasm. One way to do this is to make the content relevant and meaningful to them.

Ask the students questions: Have you ever . . . ? How would you feel if . . . ?

Incorporate areas of student interests into the lessons. When teaching writing, grammar, spelling, or reading, for example, you can create sentences and other content around things they like.

As an example, you could have your students try to find all the nouns in sentences like this: The superhero in the movie you watched last night turned into a spider.

3. Turn lessons into games

Students might learn best and be most engaged when they are having fun. With this concept in mind, more attention has been given in to the benefits of playing games in the classroom. There are many ways to gamify a lesson, ranging from student-picked avatars to yearlong class quests.

4. Turn lessons into stories

Storytelling is another highly engaging strategy to use in the classroom. This practice, which has been around for thousands of years, engages both the emotional and logical parts of being human. Stories engage listeners and might help them to remember the information embedded within the story.

5. Offer choices

Students, like most people, enjoy the opportunity to have choices. They like knowing they have control over some aspect of their learning. Having choices gives them agency. They are responsible for sitting up, taking notice, and making intentional decisions about which direction their education will take. Choices can come in many forms, such as deciding which topic to learn about, how to learn it, which activities to do, or how to present what they have learned.

Using a variety of approaches to engage students in a lesson

In teaching, not every method will prove effective with every student. For this reason, think of these engaging teaching methods as a tool in your teaching toolbox that you can use when student interest starts to waver.

What do you think? As a teacher, which teaching strategies have you utilized that have most effectively engaged your students? What would you add to this list? 

This article was adapted from a blog post initially developed by the education technology company Classcraft, which was acquired by HMH in 2023. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of HMH.

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